Knowledge is power Guard it well - An Adeptus Mechanicus story
by Librarian Astelan
Summary: This is the story of techpriest Hephaestos getting his initiation in the true workings of the Adeptus Mechanicus. And dealing with the consequences following that lesson. Needless to say, not everything ends well.
1. Chapter 1: Conclave

**21 years ago**

The proficient fingers of Hephaestos' left hand manipulated his personal dataslate with quick, precise movements to scroll to the extract he was looking for. Meanwhile, his right hand was still filling in a matrix with the aid of his well-used silver auto quill, noting down a few reference lines from the last bit of text he had been reading. Hephaestos didn't even need the slight flickering light of the iron glowglobe next to the pile of tomes on the wooden table to record the relevant data. His ocular implants had no trouble whatsoever to decipher his notes in black ink on the yellow piece of synthparch, even as an unaugmented man would have to hold the glowglobe right next to the text to pierce the gloom of librarium cellar 655b and the fine haze of soot particles that could be found anywhere within a 300 mile radius of the forge complex of Mount Pertubo.

So involved was Hephaestos with his study that his sensors didn't manage to pick up the approach of another tech priest. Nor did he see the disdain on the scowling face of the woman now standing only two feet behind Hephaestos' red robed back. The fact that he didn't notice the binaric scraping of her throat, only served to annoy the other adept even further until she finally grabbed the shoulder of the man who had been sitting there for over nine hours. The female tech priest managed to keep the irritation from having to use her hands, out of her voice and skipped the 128 curses that had been suggested by her language capacitators. "MP5568-05. Our superior, Mech-Deacon Tremendus 8878, has send me to fetch you. It is time for conclave."

Startled by the sharp voice, which he immediately connected to the pict of adept Venatoria-81TCH together with notes of his major observations - highly intelligent, impatient & arrogant - Hephaestos MP5568-05 rose to his feet, the two copper coloured bionic legs responding in the blink of an eye, unburdened by the cramped position they had been in for the better part of a Pertubo workshift. Unfortunately, Hephaestos' mind wasn't as adroit as his legs which meant that his answer wasn't nearly as efficient. "Ah... Yes... Ehrm... Yes, of course Venom... I mean, adept Venat-t-toria. I will... Ehrm... make arrangements to arrive... Ehrm."

But his fellow student had already turned her back at him, not even deigning him worthy of a retort, even as Hephaestos had adressed her with the slanderous call-name she knew him to use behind her back. The tech priest added another 1 behind the tally of occasions where his manners had fallen short of being sufficient. The number now stood at 12.365 and once more he observed the patterns in the data. He could only conclude that his strategy to limit the number of social interactions to a minimum, had been the only succesful one.

Without wasting more time - Venatoria was already heading to the door of the librarium cellar - Hephaestos quickly scattered some fine white sand over the piece of parchment to dehydrate the last bits of ink from the auto quill and curled it up so he could fit it into the stained grox leather map case that he had once won from an Imperial Guard sergeant from the Keldis Rifles. Although winning was a relative notion that day as the sergeant had put it on the pokir table to replace the small mountain of copper pieces that Hephaestos had actually won. Risking another few seconds, Hephaestos took picts of the first ten pages of the tome on top of the stack so he would have something to read during the conclave.

Now adept Venatoria actually did curse when she saw him extending the number of picts from ten to thirty. Without dousing the glow globe, Hephaestos started running towards her, slinging the Guard map case over his shoulder and lifting the slips of his red robes slightly so he wouldn't stumble over them, but his change in behaviour didn't change Venatoria's mood. "You think yourself above the conclave, MP5568-05?" she said when he arrived at her side. "Ehrm... No..." he mumbled, thinking exactly the opposite, only to reinforce his lie with more conviction as he thought he saw her nose cringing, a sure sign of her disapproval. "No, no, no. Not at all. No, no." He focused the lenses on the blue and green irisses of the female adept next to him, but saw no reason to believe her convinced. "Quite the contrary, in fact. The conclave is..." "Composed out of tech priests with greater skill and knowledge than you. Right?" Venatoria cut in, challenging Hephaestos once more. This time Hephaestos tried another strategy and just kept quiet, averting the six red lenses of his visor from the other adept's face. And this time, his strategy met with success as the other tech priest didn't follow up on her question. In silence they marched to the elevator station to start their way up towards the personal quarters of their teacher and superior: Mech-Deacon Tremendus.

Mech-Deacon Tremendus 8878's personal quarters were located somewhere midway of one of the needle like spires of Mount Pertubo's Librarium. Having abandoned the need for physical privacy a long time ago, Tremendus had rearranged the rooms drastically. All the inner walls had been torn down to create one space with a single massive window looking out over the southern slope of Mount Pertubo and the grey, rocky wasteland beyond. Seemingly haphazardly placed across the room were a desk, service station, charging station and a mansized cogitator connected to an impresssive number of datalooms. But over the years, Hephaestos had discerned a subtle but unfailing logical pattern in the placement of these items. Unfortunately, the gains in efficiency were drastically diminished by the unbelievable amount of tomes, scrolls, books and dataslates that were piled up everywhere one looked. Datacrystals littered the floor and pieces of synthparch could be found everywhere: sticking out of drawers, pinned against wooden shelves or even squeezed between the grills of the charging station, making the thing a bigger fire hazard than some of the more uglier hacks Hephaestos had witnessed aboard the shabby pilgrim ship during his youth. Still, Tremendus seemed to prosper in this environment and as his quarters were never visited by one of the magi of the Librarium, no one said anything about it.

Close to the large rectangular window stood seven seats, two of which bore the weight of a dozen books and dataslates, while the back of a third one had been used to scribble down a mathematical problem and two possible solutions. Hephaestos had solved the problem a long time ago during one of the hundreds of conclaves of Tremendus' students. Anything was better than listening to the endless complaints and basic interpretations of standard works, which meant that Hephaestos' attention usually was elsewhere, focused on whatever he could read from his position in the circle. An attitude that had attributed quite a bit to the high tally of failed social interactions, but that had also earned him numerous insights and chances to expand his knowledge even further.

Adept Venatoria-81TCH sighed as they stepped into the room - she really hated manual labour and even the effort of removing the books and slates from her chair was enough to provoke a sign of agitation - but Hephaestos was blissfully unaware of this as he surged forwards, relishing the chance to take a closer look at the titles of the works that impeded him sitting down comfortably. This time though, the looks of the other five tech priests were enough reminder for Hephaestos to just put the stack of books on the ground next to him, pushing the titles in binary to his enhanced brain to look into them later. The tech-priest next to him, adept Garant, gave him an encouraging nod, echoed by the two finely crafted silver mechadendrites on his back. It was the only positive reception he received from his peers. The other three adopted a neutral stance at best or showed small signs of irritation, resembling those Venatoria had displayed earlier in the cellars. When he sat down, the six lenses of his visor crossed the bionic eyes of Tremendus, who was inscrutinable for anyone outside of the Mechanicus (and for many within its ranks as well) due to the complete reconversion of his face, but the years in his presence had learned Hephaestos that the man was now looking at him with benevolence: his shoulders were slightly bend forwards and his artificial skull was ever so slightly turned towards the junior tech priest.

And so began another session of the conclave. The gathering of the pupils that were directly instructed by the mech-deacon. Each and everyone of them would need to give a relatively short briefing of the lore they had delved into, the insights they had developed or the difficulties they had encountered during their study. They were all obliged to attend. From start to finish. This was one controversial rule that was discussed every now and again or at least ever since Hephaestos had joined the conclave. Garant had told him that before his arrival the rule hadn't been as controversial. Despite the debates, Tremendus held on to it, staying true to his motto that one could learn from anything. Both Hephaestos as Venatoria's group disagreed, both for the same reason, but each with a different perspective. Luckily for Hephaestos Tremendus hadn't held on to his other principle - equality between his pupils - as Hephaestos would probably have died from boredom if he would have received the same tasks as the others.

That day adept Profokov/Kivo, a rather young member of the group but already mounted on a grav-sled, albeit of poor quality, was presenting his findings about the dogma that teached that the Emperor and the Omnissiah were one single entity. Having read "Martian Theology" by Grand Magos Taylius and "Dogma's of the Omnissiah" by the seventeenth fabricator general of Rhodin IV and a few dozen books and essays about the subject, Hephaestos couldn't say he was very interested. The whole idea of having two different entities would be, apart from being blasphemous, also be the death of mankind, as the loyalty of the Mechanicus to the Imperium was forged with the bridging figure of the Omnissiah/Emperor. In Hephaestos' opinion the rest of the Imperium wouldn't stand a chance without the Mechanicus. Something most men wouldn't agree with and which was reflected in the status of many servants of the Machine God holding low positions in society. This was something Hephaestos had experienced himself during his stay aboard the pilgrim vessel and still frustrated him. Of course, the practicality of the debate meant nothing to Profokov as he, like the other pupils, were all bred to join the ranks of the Mechanicus, born and raised on forge worlds. For him it was but an exercise. There was nothing to do for Hephaestos but to wait it out, or find another, more worthy point of attention.

Hephaestos looked down to the stack of dataslates that Venatoria had dropped quite carelessly aside his own seat. The top slate was still active, betrayed by the little green light that lit up every 15.2 seconds. The tech priest crossed his bionic legs so he could gently and inconspicuously give the data slate a little nudge, spurring the simple machine spirit inside to refresh the screen. Slowly the screen started to lit up. Hephaestos looked around if anyone had seen his transgression, checking his peers first and his mentor last, following the logic of checking high risks first, but it seemed they were all somehow captivated by Profokov's endless & boring presentation. The only thing that might have noticed was one of the three servo skulls of Tremendus that had his augur array in his direction, but even for a tech priest it was hard to see what operational procedures those boneheads were running.

Hephaestos turned the fifth lens of his visor, the one with the most appropriate zoom capability, towards the data slate, registering the soft whining of the little servo's directly with his inner ear. Not to his surprise, he looked down on a bit of text and a rather complicated schematic which, after running some basic specs through his memory cores, he could classify as something resembling subatomic particles, although there was something seriously wrong with it. Hephaestos couldn't put his finger on it and once more he cursed the fact that his memory cores were only a very basic model and that cross-references weren't made automatically. What he could do was create a mental image of the schematic, building it up from the bare essentials, adding details and filling in the last of the blanks at the end. At least he would be able to do more research in the near future. Something he would be aching to do, because, as usual, the mere hint of new knowledge had triggered a small ache at the back of the skull. And he knew that only the collection of relevant data would be enough to sooth that ache.

Hephaestos didn't need to look up to check his peers. The other five lenses whirled around and concluded that they were still enthralled by Profokov/Kivo's hypotheses. Only the bonewhite servoskull with the red X-shaped symbol of the Librarium might have been paying attention to him. So he risked nudging the data slate once more. The machine spirit complied without the slightest digital purr and more text scrolled down on the pictscreen. Hephaestos' trained look picked out the most important words instantly, using the technogrammar of the text to link them together and his own enhanced brain to bring in even more context from other sources, carefully ordered and categorized in his memory cores: Graviton beams, intra-atomic force, neutronic spin. These words and concepts were all connected to the central, but to Hephaestos utterly unknown concept of chronoton particles. The tech priests filed query after query, taxing his memory cores and logicalculus drive until he could feel the heat building up in his skull, a sure sign to stop his searches, but still he couldn't find any other reference, not even vaguely to chronoton particles. Even while the temperature levels of his coils surpassed his personal max, which lay already far above standard safety protocol, Hephaestos didn't want to give up.

Perhaps fortunately for his brain, mech-deacon Tremendus interrupted the peer discussion, picking the three servoskulls out of the air with his delicate mechadendrites to start inloading the discussion notes. As usual he would now comment on the relevant parts of the pupil's presentation, pointing out the merits, but more often, the flaws in their discourse. The sign for Hephaestos to archive all active queries and start paying attention. In the past Tremendus had shown that his lack of attention during the presentation didn't bother him, although ignoring the mech-deacon's insights, was quite something else. The burned out MIU-port on his left arm served as a harsh and constant reminder that even though Tremendus was the man that had rescued him from a lifetime of mindnumbing and almost certainly deadly labour, he still was a demanding and utterly strict teacher. The day Hephaestos had come completely unprepared before him, was the same day that Tremendus had jacked him up on the internal circuitry of an Adeptus Arbites shockmaul via his MIU-port. The lesson wasn't forgotten so the six lenses of his visor turned towards the holoprojection in the middle of the room and Hephaestos eagerly awaited Tremendus' words.

Two terran hours and 43.34 minutes later Tremendus' lesson came to an end. Time in which the small ache at Hephaestos' still biological brain stem had gone from a diminuitive and smouldering nagging feeling to a wildly beating hurt that Hephaestos believed to be as visible as a throbbing carotid artery of an unaugmented human confronted with an angry skitari. Anxious to take his leave, the tech priest left the conclave with inappropriate speed which got him far more strange looks than even a non-illusionary bobbing skullbase would have provoked. When all the pupils had left the mech-deacon's quarters, only the three servo skulls were witness of Tremendus, picking up the data slate with a satisfactory purring of cogitator circuits.


	2. Chapter 2: Garant

_Two months later_

The cogitator screen of Hephaestos' personal workstation lit up his quarters with a faint green light, reflected in the six lenses of Hephaestos' visor. The clicking sound of Hephaestos' fingers tapping the round and shiny, steel buttons was the only thing to be heard in the cell, bouncing of the thick rockcrete walls covered with paper schematics, synthparch tables who themselves were littered with a multitude of small paper notes, often in crude low gothic translations of the more pure techno-lingua of Hephaestos' own making. The tech priest sat behind his desk, bent forwards, his face closer to the screen than necessary. His whole body was tensed and the servo's of his bionic legs were softly whining from the stress Hephaestos was unconsciously putting them under. This all betrayed utter concentration and perhaps a shade of anxiousness.

The screen showed a complex map 99.85% of the Imperial population wouldn't be able to read, let alone use it to navigate by. This was because of the fact that one needed to know both the schematics of complex Mechanicus circuitry and the perhaps even more complex biological neural pathways of the human brain to understand what one was looking at. The left part of the screen was filled with a command box, filled with long lines of transfused code that only grew longer as Hephaestos continued to punch the worn cogitator buttons with breathtaking speed. A small red, blipping dot on the map showed him on which node or chip circuit he was working on, but Hephaestos' attention was frequently drawn to the timer that was counting down way too fast to his liking. The time was only an indication and not really a precise one, but it was the best he had been able to construct. When the timer would hit zero, the likeliness that adept Venatoria would abandon her sleep cycle - and so disconnect her electro capacitator charging port from the net - would approach ninety percent, which was already more than he would normally risk as a sudden loss of connection could cause quite the backlash. But Hephaestos felt he had no choice. His research into chronoton particles had led him down a road that had been dark and twisty and what he had found along the way was way too explosive to store in his own personal datalooms. He needed a place to store his research so that it couldn't be traced back to him. Planting the majority of his research in the datalooms of his rival pupil seemed like a convenient and elegant solution. But he had grossly underestimated the firewalls and security measures Venom had put in place to stop exactly this kind of operation.

The red numbers of the timer flashed white once, alerting him he had now only 256 seconds left before the threshold would be passed. Hephaestos let a curse slip in techno-lingua, bending even further fowards, registering a 5.3% increase in the speed and 10.7% increase in the force of his fingers ramming on the keyboard. This was the fifth time he was trying to break through Venatoria's safety barriers and it wasn't looking good. The bitch had somehow managed to procure a progressive pathway scrambler which meant that every time Hephaestos broke off the operation, he would have to start from scratch. Time slipped by as Hephaestos got closer and closer to securing a free data inload channel to send his datapackage to her core memory spools. As soon as he would manage to put it in, retrieving it would be much easier, as the package also included something mech-deacon Tremendus referred to as a 'fishing line'. The title for the little piece of programming meant nothing to Hephaestos, but the function of the little machine spirit was clear enough. The timer flashed white twice now, passing 128 seconds in the blink of an eye, which meant that he was already incurring a 2 in 3 risk of Venom waking up too early.

Hephaestos fired up a little machine spirit he had created and nursed following the schematics and the related instructions of a relatively newly recovered STC - it had only been found approximately 1.203 terran years ago during an expedition into the Tisiphoné cluster – so he could use it for this particular task. The machine spirit was housed in what looked like a standard data crystal, but as Hephaestos stuck it into his own cogitator station, the little critter burst out and made his way along the copper fiber network to its target, frying a few choice systems that were even now resisting Hephaestos' attempts of breaking into adept Venatoria's core systems. But even as the timer now indicated only 64 seconds left, it seemed it wouldn't be enough and even though he tried, Hephaestos couldn't stop himself from starting to run the chances of Venom waking up, causing even more of his raw processing power to be drained from his actual objective. With 32 seconds on the clock, he started to incant the abortion sequence albeit with gritted teeth which provoked some nasty scratching noises from his vox grill.

Hephaestos pushed away his chair backwards violently, trying and failing to contain his fury and frustration and limit it to futile agitation. He nearly punched in the screen of his cogitator station, flailing his arms around wildly instead. He ignored the signals of his brain that this behaviour was far beneath any adept of the Mechanicus and instead initiated a long techno-lingua rant cursing Venatoria-81TCH's firewalls, the infernal sluggishness of his personal cogitator station and finally, in a short moment of self-reflection, his own sense of curiosity which had brought him in this position in the first place. This insight infuriated Hephaestos even further and he stormed back to the cogitator station, having changed his mind on sparing the piece of equipment, when suddenly he heard three short knocks on the thick steel door of his cell. Hephaestos quickly ran some equations to calculate whether the breaking of his cogitator screen would be heard outside and, based on the results, had to change his course of action yet again.

Opening the door revealed, as expected, the form of adept Garant, properly dressed in his red silk Mechanicus robe, with two slits in the back to allow an unimpeded use of his mechadendrites. The adept hadn't had any improvements to his face, so Hephaestos' inspection showed him two almond-shaped, auburn coloured eyes under thin black eyebrows, a short and delicate nose and a broad smile with two rows of sparkling white teeth. This was somewhat of a contradiction. The quality of his robes, but more importantly, that of the two fine silver mechadendrites made sure everybody understood that, despite a formal rank, Garant was of good breed and had some powerful benefactors within the Mechanicus. The lack of facial implants - even Hephaestos had managed to score a visor and a rebreather unit with vox box - was at odds with his presumed status. The explanation of this incongruety was something Hephaestos had struggled with for a few months, until Garant had revealed the reason himself. His ambition was to become an Executor Fetial for one of the titan legions - a job which would require him to frequently deal with unaugmented humans - and only these legions provided augmentics that resembled the unmodified human face. A feature that would be of great importance if one would communicate with ordinary humans.

Garant didn't wait until Hephaestos invited him in and Hephaestos could hardly blame him for it, as experience had taught both men that chances were Hephaestos would simply never think to do so. Although this time, not inviting Garant in, wouldn't have been by accident.

"Garant... Ehrm... Good... How good of you to... dist... How good of you to come by." Hephaestos stuttered. "That's alright Heph. Seems like you could use someone to get you out of your... own personal librarium, or whatever you've done to this cell." the other techpriest replied, amazement in his eyes. Immediately the problem became clear to Hephaestos. Not his flushed face or other signs in his body language that he was experiencing a considerable frustration were the problem. But the fact that Garant was looking at some of the logaritmic tables, used to bypass Venom's firewalls, that hung above Hephaestos' cogitator station, was far more unsettling and Hephaestos wanted nothing more to draw away attention from the drawings and notes on his cell walls. Which resulted in yet another awkward social occasion as Hephaestos blurted out the other tech-priest's name: "GARANT!"

The outburst did help, but only for a short while as Garant immediately turned his attention away from the tables, but straight onto Hephaestos himself, his face bearing a curious expression and his stance betraying far too much surprise. Hephaestos decided to make the best of it. "You are right... Right, right, right... that I've spent too much time here. You... ehrm... are most gracious to come and find me, adept Garant. I... I thank you for... your attention... Let us... ehrm... get going." Hephaestos uttered, trying to salvage the situation. His cranial cogitators almost automatically calculated the chance that Garant would be sufficiently distracted. The result was far from reassuring. "You're sure you're alright, my friend? Looks like you've just experienced a short-circuit." Garant answered, his voice trailing, "Not that that would surprise me." as he looked back at the jumble of papers and synthparch against the walls.

"My systems are all running within safety parametres, Garant. Nothing here... to look at." Hephaestos replied hurriedly. The sooner he would get the other techpriest out of his cell, the better. His mind raced to find a good way to accomplish this, without reverting to physical violence. "You sure, Heph?" Garant said, stepping closer to the cogitator station. "You sound even more fazed than normal, if you'll allow me." With one mechadendrite he reached for the little datacrystal that contained Hephaestos' little circuit fryer. "Sure, sure, sure... Really sure." Hephaestos replied, feeling anything but sure. He wanted to step in and snatch the datacrystal from under the other techpriest's nose, but realized two milliseconds later that such a move would only heighten suspicion. So he changed his mind and instead stepped backwards. Nothing he could have said could have been as helpful, because him stepping out of the room was cue for Garant to follow him out. Hephaestos would have smiled for such a little stroke of luck, if his mind wasn't still racing about the implications of Garant having seen the material.

"So, you want to hit the Obs? Or are you actually considering going to The Holo? I'm banning you from the Librarium. You have been studying quite enough, if that mess in your cell is anything to go by." Garant said, stepping in again as he knew that waiting on Hephaestos to come up with a plan, might take a while. Hephaestos remained silent for a moment, running through his options. Garant was suggesting to go to the Observatorium, one of the highest places on Mount Pertubo where you could actually see some stars and which was a great place to quietly converse in private as not a lot of techpriests here placed a lot of interest in the firmament. Or to go to The Holo. One of the more seedier places in the Librarium's spires where a few enterprising menials had set up shop, selling all kinds of legal and illegal means for the ordinary techpriest to relax.

"The Obs." Hephaestos decided. Although it would have been easier to arrange for Garant to OD on some sort of digi drug, Hephaestos had calculated a 78.53% chance that he would be able to redirect Garant's interest in any other direction than Hephaestos' plans for hostility and a 32.2% chance that he would be able to succesfully deceive Garant into thinking the plans were something else entirely, but only if he would be able to completely concentrate on his efforts. Something he wouldn't be able to do at The Holo where he would at least have to enjoy a few 330cc alcoholic beverages to keep up appearances. And besides, he didn't really like the idea of killing his only friend, but as they walked to one of the dozens of transport hubs of the Librarium, Hephaestos couldn't help but taking a close up pict with the fifth zoom lens of his visor of the serial number of Garant's electro capacitator charging port.

15.23 minutes later, both techpriests stood under the massive armourcrys dome that worked as a magnifier, without a single machine spirit intervening. Hephaestos always had mixed feelings when he thought about that little fact. On the one hand, the cupola was quite an achievement, but on the other, it felt like the presence of the Omnissiah was missing in the construction devoid of all electronics. Both students sat down and looked up through the glass towards the skies. Hephaestos' audio receivers noticed a slight raise in the pinch of Garant's portable power system and logical deduction revealed that the other techpriest had started heating his system. Hephaestos could only agree with Garant's environmental analysis and followed suit. At the same time, he tried to come up with a plausible explanation for what his peer had seen in his cell. But once more, he lost the initiative in a social interaction: Adept Garant just started talking to him in techno-lingua.

"So, Heph. What do you want to talk about? I'm assuming that you have something to tell me seeing as you chose this venue." the adept said, looking with his inefficient biological eyes into Hephaestos' visual sensors. "Ehrm... Yes." Hephaestos replied, rather unprepared at the question. His mind was racing and tapping into his language cores to check whether he needed to worry about Garant's suggestion of coming clean. The results were inconclusive and an uncomfortable silence started to grow. Of course without Hephaestos noticing. "Soooo, what about?" Garant probed carefully, perhaps mistaking the long silence for hesitance instead of processing time. Hephaestos realized he needed to start talking and with a stroke of luck, his memory spools provided him with a solution. "Ehrm... Tomorrow is the annual remembrance of my initiation within the ranks of the Mechanicus. I was..." Hephaestos turned one of his lenses 43° towards the other student, gauging whether this subject might attract his attention. Garant didn't seem exactly captivated, but was still looking expectantly at him. "You never did tell me how you got accepted as a student of Tremendus. And seeing as I joined conclave after you... Why? Did something... irregular happen when you were initiated?" Now Hephaestos made a strange giggling sound. Irregular was quite the understatement. Seeing as the subject would provide him ample content to fill the time with during this impromptu excursion, Hephaestos started talking. And with his memory spools providing all the material, his rate of speech increased drastically.

"It's mostly blind luck that I managed to get this position. In fact, Rhodin IV or Mount Pertubo weren't even my destination. My parents, designations Bao and Fai Ra, conceived me aboard a pilgrim ship, the Scorpio Tauris. I was born there as well, named Wei Ra. The ship was travelling from shrine world to shrine world until it would reach Ossuar. Both its crew and its passengers were obsessed with the worship of the Emperor. I... I didn't really fit in." Garant sniggered softly. "I can only imagine." Hephaestos took it as a sign that he had Garant's full attention. "Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Well... I found refuge with the ship's Mechanicus crew. Although that might be an overstatement. I was tolerated. I was allowed to watch them work. And I learned. Not only about the ship and its machine spirit, but also of the rites of the Omnissiah. After a few years they allowed me to join in. It didn't sit well with my biological ancestors. They... Suffice to say that when my own biological transition to adulthood set in, our rate of conflicts spiked. When we made port at Rhodin IV, I fled the Scorpio. One of the adepts of the ship made sure I got a job at the forges of Mount Pertubo as a slag worker. It was then that I changed my name to Hephaestos. I needed... a fresh start. Although I admit that it was a rather irrational thing to do."

Garant mumbled something vaguely assenting. "But that doesn't put you here in the Librarium." Although Hephaestos was anything but an expert in picking up the subtle signs of human body language, he could tell that Garant was captivated by the story. "No. And I have to say that working as a common worker isn't exactly the best way to get accepted within the ranks of the servants of the Omnissiah. I worked for 20,523 terran years in the forges before I caught the attention of the Mechanicus. And it still was by chance. On my last working day as a serve I slipped from a walkway and fell down on one of the melting pots of the forge. Both my legs landed in the boiling metal and were burned away in an instant. The rest of my body was mostly protected from the heat by the environmental suit. My fellow workers got me to the local medicae facility. I was unconscious most of the time. Luckily. I fear that my body would have shut down permanently if it would have had to face the unsensored sensation of pain. When I regained conscience, I noticed that I was in an operating chamber with two low grade prostetics laying ready to replace my biological limbs. As I wasn't a particularly valuable labourer the legs were of F-grade quality." Hephaestos could see how Garant checked out his current limbs and noted that since then his situation had improved considerably. "In the time it took the surgeon to arrive at the room and desinfect his instruments, I had managed to improve the linking mechanism to increase the quality of the synaps-connections." Now Garant laughed out loud, approving of Hephaestos little stunt. "The story of the man that improved his own bionics even as he was being prepared to get them fitted, became a juicy bit of gossip that even got through to the circle of the senior techpriests on site. It earned me an invitation of mech-deacon Tremendus who set me on my path to become an engineseer and later, a techpriest." Garant whisled softly. "That is quite the story Heph. But you keep saying that you got lucky, but it seems to me that for the largest part, you forged your own fate. Don't write it all off on coincedence."

Hephaestos wasn't particularly interested in the praise of his peer. Instead, his thoughts were already back at his research into the chronotron particles. But leaving now all of a sudden, would reignite Garant's curiosity. So Hephaestos dug deep in his social routines and asked a question about Garant's current research instead. A sure way of keeping the man occupied. He would be able to return to his research soon enough, he thought.


	3. Chapter 3: Data breach

**9 months later**

Hephaestos secured his latest data package. It contained the most recent findings of his research and was now safely stored away. His head was still spinning from reading about the _Sedendi Omnissiah_. The ship had only peeked his interest as it had disappeared together with the archmagos who was the lead researcher on chronoton particles. Archmagos Canculus had been a brilliant mind, unparallelled by any of his peers at the time in the sector. Hephaestos assumed that the man had been lost together with his ship. A terrible loss and an example of a brilliant cover up operation. The wreck of the ship, or better, some parts of the ship had been found at the edge of an asteroid field by scavengers. Or so he had read in the diary of Scass Nethaniu, scion of house Nethaniu, captain of the _Black Falcon_ and rogue trader. Captain Nethaniu had only devoted a short paragraph to his encounter with the scavengers and his own observations - the book was kept in the restricted area of the Librarium for its other contents - and in the small extract the references to treason were there to be found. Although Nethaniu didn't speculate about the culprit, he had clearly identified the damage to the ship as caused by Imperial weapons. Hephaestos harboured some suspicions to a more concrete party within the Imperium, but those were mostly hunches as Nethaniu's description were far too short to formulate a proper hypotheses.

Hephaestos swept the sweat of his brow, preventing it to leak into the slits of the tiny grill at the top of his ocular visor. His sensors indicated that the heat inside the maintenance room above one of the main dataloom racks of the Librarium was now well over 43 degrees and there wasn't a cooling unit nor any ventilation pipes in the cramped room he could use to regulate the temperature. Although a little sweat leaking into his visor wouldn't cause any technical malfunctions, Hephaestos knew that it would cause an itch he couldn't scratch - unless he removed the visor entirely, but that would effectively blind him. And that would be a predicament he'd rather do without. At this time, Hephaestos had become more paranoid than an undercover arbitrator inside an obscura den.

And for good reason. Everything was going too smooth, Hephaestos thought as he leaned back on the simple tripod chair and put the machine spirit of the cogitator before him to rest. For example: the original source, the fragment he had looked at in mech-deacon Tremendus' quarters had included several references to other sources, but most of those were stored in the restricted area of the Librarium. This area stood apart from the other buildings of the Librarium and was only accessible via a cableway over a deep crevasse in Mount Pertubo. The black stone tower, with large, laid-in obsidian Mechanicus hieroglyphs, had its own gatehouse, where the cableway arrived, complete with gun emplacements, manned by L-class servitors. There was no way to access this fortress of forbidden knowledge if you hadn't had a passkey or commanded a Reaver-class titan. But just when Hephaestos had thought to quit his research, he'd received word that he had been assigned temporarily to the service of genetor Malus-B. A job that came with supplemental security privileges. The assignment itself had been ridiculously easy, but Hephaestos attributed that to his own superior intellect. After he had finished the job and returned to mech-deacon Tremendus' service, no one had revoked those privileges.

But there was more to consider. Tremendus had been absent these last few months, stating that he was preoccupied with his own research. The number of meetings of the conclave was drasticly cut, increasing Hephaestos' spare hours with 15%. And the great stream of assignments from the mech-deacon had withered down to a small creek on which every now and again came a small assignment. When Hephaestos had discussed this change in process with Garant, his friend had induced that there was a 9 in 10 chance that this was in correlation with Tremendus' research gaining momentum. Whatever the reason, the lack of tasks had had an even greater impact on his free time. After one of the rare conclaves, Hephaestos had wondered out loud whether they weren't supposed to volunteer for other tasks from other scholars. A suggestion that had been received with a nasty look and retort from adept Venatoria and dismissive binary rattle from the other pupils.

Just like all the times before, when he had considered this peculiar circumstances, Hephaestos couldn't put his finger on the underlying problem. He still felt funny when he thought about it - his digestive system seemed to cramp up anytime he did this, making him ache for a bionic replacement even more than normally - but he had decided a long time ago that this thing that some magi biologis had defined as intuition, was just a load of faulty lore, so he sticked to proper logic and reason. Hephaestos was just about to start looking for a sewage access point to relieve his system from some excess fluid and processed food waste - he found this was an effective cure for any intuition he felt - when the screen of the cogitator station lit up again. Surprised Hephaestos sat upright again to put the machine spirit of the cogitator to rest again. The techpriest was even more surprised to see how the command box on the screen suddenly filled itself with row after row of machine code. Immediately Hephaestos realized that someone was remotely accessing this service station and only a second later electro-chills went up and down his spine. Especially when he realized that the lines of code were anything but a routine check from some thirteenth-in-a-dozen engineseer to check on the temperature levels of the datalooms below him. Hephaestos considered himself a fluent speaker and reader of techno-lingua, but with this code he could hardly decipher what was going on, before the faint green characters of the code disappeared from the screen to make room for new ones.

Hephaestos tried to separate his attention between two things now. One was following the commands on the screen. The other was analyzing his situation. He'd chosen this access point to the Librarium network because it was hardly ever used by anyone. It was hard to find, unpleasant to work at and Hephaestos' research had pointed out that the datalooms below him were one of the sets that had suffered the least malfunctions in the last decade. No one had been using this station, a fact underlined by the complete lack of ointments and an alarming level of negligence concerning the removal of the ever present sooth particles. Hephaestos had used almost half his personal stash of refined oils and anti-oxidation products to clean the little thing - which also meant he had had to ration his personal maintenance, something which could be noticed by the state of his bionic legs. Hephaestos ached for a proper oil bath to cleanse them from the sooth of Mount Pertubo's industrial forges. So for anyone to use this station now, was highly unlikely. Perhaps just as unlikely as a security passkey without an expiration date. His intuition acted up again when his brain managed to process the most likely scenario's based on the few code words he had been able to identify. Hephaestos had to conclude with a 87.3% certainty that someone was using his "fishing line" to access all his data on the chronoton particles.

"Tilt." cursed Hephaestos and he rammed his hands on the still sticky keys of the cogitator. "Tilt, tilt, tilt!" 2.6 seconds later, it was clear to him that the command box was locked off by the remote user. Another 6.3 seconds later, the tech-priest had to conclude that the manual override, a big lever for emergency shut down at the back of the cogitator station, had also been rendered moot. Hephaestos saw only one last option to stop the process, but a nagging signal at his logicalculus implant was telling him that it was probably too late already. Still, he considered breaking the hardline, the thick copper datafiber wire protected by a seamless coating of reinforced plastex. He looked at the black-and-yellow striped cable and compared its integrity factor with his max strength output... He didn't stand a chance. Perhaps if he had a lascutter or even a chainaxe, but with his bare hands... Still, against all logic and reason, Hephaestos took hold of the cable and pulled it with a wild jerk.

But logic and reason can't be ignored. After another few, more desperate but also more pathetic attempts, Hephaestos dropped the cable and turned to cursing again. But when he had cursed before, it was a soft whisper, barely audible over the background static of his vox box. Now the curses rolled from the walls in the confined maintenance room and anyone could hear the fear echoing in them. Hephaestos structured and ordered mind was a complete chaos. Thoughts about the severity of his crimes, the forbidden character of his research, possible escape routes and anger at himself and his damned curiosity all fought for priority. His short-term memory core stopped recording his thoughts, which gave Hephaestos' biological, and more primitive brain all the room to run wild with counterproductive emotions. Hephaestos ranted on and on, mixing techno-lingua with the Pertubo low gothic dialect and even the occasional high gothic curse. At some point his brain even provided him with a prayer to the Emperor, coming from his deeply buried past as a pilgrim's child and in the future Hephaestos would be thankful that his short-term memory core had given out at that point.

But one can only scream for so long, especially when one's vox box gives out. Taxed to the limit by the incessant cursing and wailing of its owner, the little machine spirit suddenly shorted out and rebooted, switching Hephaestos' rant for a moment of silence, followed by a standard test-protocol consisting of a series of beeps and buzzes. Utterly surprised, Hephaestos ceased the stream of words and binaric strings and came to his senses. He restored his cognitive functions and focused his mind. Even as the last whistling sounds bounced of the dirty walls of the room, he checked the pict screen once more. He could see how the data package was being transferred at an alarming speed. It was only because Hephaestos had made copies of every single source he had crossed during his research - which had resulted in an extremely large package - that the transfer wasn't completed just yet. Hephaestos picked up the little stool he had knocked over while ranting and started studying the techno-lingua codes still scrolling down the screen. He had a purpose once more. His brain had provided him with a solution to his predicament. He needed to retrace the code once the station would be unlocked again. Because whoever was downloading his research, be it a rival pupil or a data guardian of the Librarium, whoever was retrieving his data, he or she had to die.

* * *

But when Hephaestos had finally found out who had taken over his dedicated cogitator station, he hadn't gone looking for a handcannon or a shock maul. Nor did he rush over to the adept Mechanicus who he believed was behind it all. He thought his secrets safe and instead returned to his own quarters, contemplating how to react to this unexpected, but in hindsight, not surprising, revelation. Instead of killing the other party, Hephaestos now believed he could bargain. Immunity was definitely on the table. But perhaps more could be gained: a license to continue his research or even cooperation. For the first time in months, Hephaestos felt that he had some control over the situation. It was a relief to finally be able to lean back and consider his options.

He laid back on the metal bunk in his cell. On the polished rockcrete floor beside him, stood a half finished fist-sized bottle of amasec with a rubber straw - his vox box didn't permit drinking like an unmodified human. Hephaestos didn't particulary like the taste of the beverage, but in limited quantities, the drink relaxed his nerves and mind. Sometimes it helped him look at a dilemma or problem from a whole new angle, the shroud over his memory cores making him more detached and open for non-standard solutions or approaches. He first considered his bargaining position, but soon his thoughts wandered to the subject of his research itself: chronoton particles. And the ability to influence them.

Hephaestos still didn't understand just where the particles could be found, but he thought he had a more solid grasp about the practical possibilities. If you could manage to trap enough of them, or banish them from a certain location, you would disturb the space-time continuum. It was Hephaestos' hypothesis that via electro-magnetic fields, you might create a null zone. Given enough stability of the field, Hephaestos believed that an object within that zone would no longer be subject to time. A state he had described as "Capti Tempore" or trapped in time for those who didn't read high gothic. Of course the Imperium knew stasis pods which did more or less the same, but Hephaestos believed that his theoretical concept was far more effective. Even in stasis, decay was present. It was just slowed to a point where it hardly mattered anymore. But Hephaestos' assumptions went even further. Without time, there could be no movement. Anything or anyone trapped in such a null zone would be trapped forever. Or at least until the electro-magnetic field would give out. And only the size of the field limited the size of the null zone. If you could create a field large enough to encompass a city, or even a planet, you could capture anything and anyone within. But to create such fields, you needed some massive electro-magnetic generators. Hephaestos considered the possibilities for an Ark Mechanicus to do so and although he could no longer calculate an exact percentile for the odds - another consequence of the amasec - he firmly believed that the _Sedendi Omnissiah_ would have been able to create such massive fields.

Hephaestos sucked the last of the amber fluid out of the bottle and casually threw it in a corner of his dark cell, picking up his personal dataslate to start processing some light reading before engaging his sleep cycle. The screen showed the vivid colours of the symbols of the chapters of the Astartes still active in the sector. There weren't too many of them and the accompanying text was written in faultless low gothic, so it would make for a short and easy read. Just the thing he needed after his hectic day. He hadn't finished half a page of it, when his screen went into lockdown. Confused Hephaestos sat up again. The screen stayed dark at first but after pushing the reset rune on the side of the thin metal slide repeatedly, it lit up again showing an elaborate symbol Hephaestos didn't immediately recognize. It was a white skull Mechanicus on a field of black with the white cogwheel in the background, but in addition to this, a blood red rune was inscribed inside the bionic eye of the skull. When he translated the rune to techno-lingua, Hephaestos froze. Despite the alcohol induced haze, his memory cores had retrieved the proper information. The symbol belonged to the Departemento Res Interni, a branch of the Mechanicus that was known to few, but those that did know it, feared it wholeheartedly. This was the division that scoured the Mechanicus for tech heresy or forbidden lore. They were unrelenting and thorough, coldhearted and cruel. They would be the mirror image of the Adeptus Arbites... If there had been something like a Lex Mechanicus. But without such a standard code of laws, they were more like the Inquisition: operating without rules nor accountability.

This was an option he hadn't considered when someone had inloaded his research data. Hephaestos had to use all his willpower to start moving again. He needed to get out and find refuge. His brain hadn't induced a fitting destination yet, but anything was better than his own cell. He quickly threw his red robes over his body and stashed the dataslate in one of the deep pockets on the inside. Feeling rushed, he fumbled with the bolt of his cell door, making sure he slammed the door full force against the wall when it finally came free. The loud metallic clang rang through the smooth rockcrete hallway. Somewhere at the back of his head, Hephaestos realized this had woken up every single adept in the wing, but he was already on his way out, not taking into account the disturbed sleep cycles, nor the attention he drew to himself. He had only one goal that guided him: putting as much space between himself and any member of Res Interni as the Omnissiah would allow. He started to run, giving complete operational control to the implants' auto-stabilizers so they could maximize speed, which meant that he in turn could free his mind to decide on his destination. But before he had specified search parametres for his memory core search, he crashed into something. He immediately registrated it was something soft and mushy, so he got himself ready to start pounding it. It probably was a member of Res Interni so, although he estimated his chances of actually managing to win a melee encounter below the 10% threshold, he believed this might be his only chance at escape. But the realization he had slammed into another person was quickly followed by a stream of curses from a voice he matched with other audio samples stored in his spools, so after two halfhearted and weak punches, he stopped the pumping motion of his right arm and instead offered the adept laying beneath him his hand. The gesture went unanswered as the lithe female techpriest now laying at his feet looked up.

This time adept Venatoria-81TCH didn't limit her language capacitators, the cursewords regularly interrupted with angry strings of binary. "You... moronic imbecile. You failed, lobotomized servitortrash. You... utter, utter scrapheap..." In normal circumstances Hephaestos would have had trouble to come up with a reply, but under current conditions, he felt a welcome freedom: he didn't had to reply at all, making this somewhat of a 'maybe' in the long list of failed social interactions. Hephaestos unceremonially stepped over the body of his fellow pupil and his neural pathways had already ordered his bionic legs to resume maximum velocity once more. Although there wasn't much to see on his face - his visor and vox box covering most of it - Hephaestos couldn't help but think of himself as grinning widely. Even as he was facing the dire threat of actual lobotomization. But unforunately the tech-priest couldn't savour the moment for long.

"Everything is in lockdown, you dolt! Where are you going?!" Venatoria sent in binary. Hephaestos' legs carried him another four metres before coming to a halt. His momentary feeling of triumph was washed away by the realization that he'd have to confront Venom, but on the other hand, a voice of reason argued that if the entire wing was under scrutiny, Res Interni couldn't be after him. Or only after him, his logicalculus drive interjected. He turned around, his six lenses focusing on the now upright form of the other pupil. Ehrm... I... Well... I just..." Luckily Venatoria didn't have the patience to listen to his stuttering. "Never mind, coghead. I'm here to get you to our master. Follow me."

Several thoughts crossed Hephaestos' cores. Why was Tremendus getting them together? Did he enjoy pairing him with Venom, causing aggravation in both parties? Did he know more about the Res Interni business? Or was he a secret member of that illustrious Departemento? His standard subroutines started to order his questions following priority and importance, but Hephaestos' mind wasn't in it. He felt a bad case of intuition coming up and with only Venom present, he didn't feel he could share his thoughts. There was nothing more to do than wait till he arrived at Tremendus' quarters. And of course recalibrate the autostabilizers of his bionic legs after his little crash into the other adept.


	4. Chapter 4: Tremendus

When Hephaestos arrived at mech-deacon Tremendus-8878's quarters, his sensors immediately noticed two differences from the normal outlook. The first one was obvious. The conclaves were always organized during daytime hours and it was far darker now. Without the light of the sun, the only light source in the large room were the dirty glow globes in the ceiling and in their feint radiance, one could see millions of little dust particles, diffusing the light even futher. But the second difference was far more subtle. And it was only because of the years of visiting these quarters that Hephaestos even noticed. Several books, tomes and data crystals had been removed from the jumble of data carriers. For example, Hephaestos noticed that a tower of books beneath Tremendus' desk had been rearranged and was 5.3% lower than before. One of the only neat lines of data slates standing on a ledge next to the door, had lost three or four elements, shown in the slightly slanted way they now stood against each other. Everywhere Hephaestos looked, he noticed these little changes. He guessed that this was all according to his master's plan.

A short burst of binary made him focus his attention. Tremendus gestured to one of the chairs while he produced a small black octaeder from his robes. As he sat down, he used a fine manipulator mechadendrite to push a tiny, hidden button at one of the eight sides of the little contraption. Immediately a soft, high pitch beep could be heard, but as its tone rose, the sound was out of Hephaestos' auditory sensor range in a second. "Now, we can exchange data." Tremendus sent, putting the unknown machine down, next to a pictscreen. Hephaestos could see that it showed the corridor leading to Tremendus' quarters. The image was bobbing slightly up and down, which made Hephaestos speculate that it was one of Tremendus' servoskulls that was taking these picts in realtime.

"I will not fool you any longer, my young friend." Tremendus spoke and Hephaestos immediately felt ill at ease. He had always hoped to be placed above his fellow pupils by his master, but the word 'friend' implied a whole lot of social conventions he didn't care for. And neither did he like the interjection of his memory cores that friendship also implied a bond where one would do things that weren't expected in a teacher-pupil relation: covering things up, taking the fall or as his memory dug up a phrase from a cheap spaceport fiction "taking one for the team". None of those things seemed profitable at this point. Or actually at any point, his logicalculus drive corrected him. But Tremendus didn't seem to notice the sudden reticence in Hephaestos.

"I will grant you a few of my insights, but we have limited time. Shock troops are on their way here, as we speak." Hephaestos studied his master's stance, but couldn't register any signs of dread or fear. "Your research has been interesting and your hypotheses were daunting. I must admit that I have enjoyed following it from a distance. Clearly you were a pupil worthy of my attention. Who could have guessed that someone that came from such a low station, would prove to be such a promising scholar. And quite an ingenuitive one... Storing your research in a hidden cache in a fellow pupil's memory core was quite innovative." Hephaestos' language capacitator picked up on the fact that Tremendus spoke in the past tense when he mentioned his tutelage and added it to the fastly growing number of factors that contributed to the lack of personal safety for the techpriest. "Surely, you wonder why you are here now."

The mech-deacon pauzed and the lenses of Hephaestos' visor locked with Tremendus' bionic eyes. Hephaestos rushed his cores to come up with an answer. It seemed far from appropriate, or even safe to produce his true suspicions, so he needed a bluff. But apparently, his brain wasn't fast enough to come up with something good, as Tremendus resumed his monologue. "I thought it only... fitting... to end your research with a proper conclusion. Although it gives me no pleasure to tell you that you have been wrong from the start. Your hypothesis of null fields was interesting; banning all chronoton particles from a specific zone. And your speculation on how to set up an experiment using electro-magnetic fields would be a fine setup to test this hypothesis."

By now Hephaestos had decided - he wished he could conclude it - that his master had set him up with this research, aiding him in unseen ways, so Hephaestos could be his proxy. A proxy that could be held responsible for when things would go wrong. So Hephaestos was once more splitting his attention. A small part of his brain registered his master's words, curious of the conclusion of his research. The other part was desperately trying to cogitate a way out, but it seemed he had little chance of escape. Tremendus was better equipped, had decades of experience over him and had planned this.

"So, what was the logic failure in my reasoning, lord?" Hephaestos asked, stalling for time. He hoped his true intentions would go unnoticed, but a short binaric burst from Tremendus - the techpriest's equivalent of a laugh - together with him revealing a compact but potent hotshot laspistol, made clear that it was futile. "I knew I wouldn't be able to deceive you, my friend. But I also know that you want to know the answers... Your experimental setup wouldn't need electo-magnetic fields. Your test environment exists. It exists all around us. Can't you think of it now?" The mech-deacon paused again, granting Hephaestos another 7.6 seconds to search for a way out. "No? How disappointing... The answer is so obvious. Vacuüm. Hard vacuüm. There's nothing there, Hephaestos. No particles, no subatomic particles and no chronoton particles. Following your simplistic theory, space travel would simply be impossible." Hephaestos registred the words and tried to turn them around, looking for a way to save his hypothesis. But Tremendus' antithesis was as sound as it was simple. There was no possible argument. Hephaestos lowered his shoulders as if the shock of the revellation literally pushed down on him. His lenses, that had been constantly zooming in and out to pick out new details in his environment, stopped buzzing and now he just stared into the barrel of the little lasweapon.

Hephaestos scraped his throath, his vox box producing a scratching sound. "Your logic is infallable, mech-deacon Tremendus 8878. Your intellect clearly superior to my own." Hephaestos saw how the laspistol was raised and leveled at his chest. "But could you perhaps help me understand..." And then he saw the cable of the pistol that disappeared beneath his master's robes. It was an old gun and the plastex coating of its power cable was worn and dirty. So was the connection point between the cable and the pistol. The other end was most likely attached to Tremendus' potentia coils. Hephaestos caught himself and finished his question. "the true mechanisms behind the chronoton particles?" Hephaestos nodded at the pictscreen on the table. "There is still time."

Tremendus hesitated for a second. Hephaestos knew he had triggered his desire to lecture him. One last time. "Please. I need to know before... Hephaestos didn't finish his sentence and pounced at his master, grabbing the laspistol with both his hands. His logicalculus drive delivered the short message that he had indeed surprised his master, but it was quickly followed by a comparison of Hephaestos' and Tremendus' maximum mechanical force output. Hephaestos realized that he'd had to be quick. With a wild jerk, he pulled at the power cable, severing the connection between the pistol and his master's potentia coils. One of his lenses registered how Tremendus pulled the trigger repeatedly, but his main visual focus was on the power cable and his target: Tremendus' main MIU access port. A strange sense of satisfaction rushed through him when he rammed the ragged end of the cable into the port and his memory cores unvoluntary brought the phrase "an eye for an eye" to the fore. The feeling became even stronger when he heard a series of uncontrolled and unsteady bleeps from his master's vox grill. He surpressed the feeling with logic and reason, concentrating on the fact that he was effectively incapacitating the mech-deacon. Tremendus staggered and as his cores were sending the appropriate nerve stimuli to press his advantage, Hephaestos spotted movement on the pict screen still standing on the table. His memory cores kicked into action and began a visual comparison of the vague image on the screen with the millions of picts gathered during research.

Tremendus seemed to regain coordination, so Hephaestos retracted the power cable and scrambled to tear off his master's robes, thus revealing the metal breastplate protecting the mech-deacon's last remaining biological organs. The realization that skitarii were inbound came together with the smell of burned biomatter. Even as Tremendus started to fall to the floor, Hephaestos ran for the door. Just his presence here was incriminating. When he thought about it, R.I. would scrutinize everyone who had been in relation to the, now spasming, mech-deacon at his feet. He stormed throught the door and sprinted for the emergency stairwells at the end of the hall and even though his cores gave him several warnings about his vital bio-functions going into overdrive, he didn't stop climbing those stairs until he fainted out... Two stories above his master's quarters.


	5. Chapter 5: Res Interni

4 months later

Hephaestos stared at the blank walls of his cell. They weren't that much different from his own quarters. They lacked a cogitator station and without the proper tools he hadn't been able to improve the vent through which stale, recycled air was blown, like he had done in his own quarters. And there was a constant humming noise. Something which bothered him to no end as he had calculated that it was a distraction that continually decreased his efficiency with 0.9%. He had considered disabling his auditory sensors, but since they were still biological, he didn't see how he would reinitiate them later, so he had dismissed that option.

Once more, his mind wandered off to that night that had robbed him of so much. The loss of his master he had seen coming at least, and although he hadn't thought of it when he had electrocuted him with his own power, he had been pretty confident that he'd be reassigned to another Librarium official. What he hadn't expected was the harsh treatment he had received from the Res Interni skitarii.

He'd regained conscious rather quick, perhaps minutes after he had crashed to the floor in the emergency stairwell. In hindsight his awakening had been rather surprising, considering the fact that one of the strongly reinforced skitari had been dragging him down to Tremendus' quarters, making sure that his head had bounced off every single step of the stairs, causing quite a few gashes in the skin of his bald head. When they had arrived, blood had been trickling down his skull and spine, but that had seemed to be the least of his trouble. Before him had stood another adept Mechanicus, his robes as red as his own, but the edges had been made from black velvet with gold filligrene symbols woven into it. Even when Hephaestos had regained his footing, after being unceremonicly tossed before the other adept's feet by the skitari, the adept from Res Interni had towered above him and judging by barrel sized chest of the man, which was clad in finely wrought armour, inlaid with silver symbols of power, Hephaestos had had a 0.00001% chance of repeating the stunt he had pulled on his master.

"Adept Hephaestos. How good of you to join us." a deep rumbling voice had said not much unlike the sound of an ore refinery grinding rocks. "You seem to find yourself in a precarious situation. Just like your master. Or, correction, late master." Hephaestos had focused two of his lenses on the body of Tremendus. For a split second he had thought he had killed the mech-deacon himself, but an instant later his brain had registred the lack of a head. Another of his lenses had turned towards another skitari, standing behind Tremendus' desk, holding up a power axe. It hadn't taken long to connect the dots. But there was no time to calculate the odds of losing his own head, as the adept before him had spoken up again. "I am Karsh, departemento Res Interni. I take it you heard about us?" Hephaestos had nodded vigorously, still trying to gather his thougths. "I am here because your master... let us say... overstepped his authority... and explored lore that was restricted to him..." At that point Hephaestos had mustered the courage to look up at adept Karsh's face, only to find that the man's entire skull had been replaced by a bionic one. Three yellow, assymetricly placed visual sensors had looked back from under the red and black hood. "And neither his proposed penance, nor his proposition for rehabilitation were particularly satisfying." Hephaestos hadn't been able to resist and had inspected the headless corpse of mech-deacon Tremendus 8878, which he had immediately regretted afterwards.

The giant before him had taken a single step towards him and used a mechadendrite shaped as an industrial pincer to lift him up from the floor. Hephaestos had dangled for exactly 8 seconds above the ground before Karsh brought another mechadendrite to bear, this one shaped more like the narcethicum of an Adeptus Astartes Apothecary. "I have reasons to believe that you shared this lust for data exploration." And before Hephaestos had been able to oppose the statement, Karsh had continued with a shussing burst of binary. "You need not waste your, nor my time with denial. I can see it in every aspect of your being, scholar. And your file, Hephaestos MP5568-05... I correctly identified you, didn't I?" Hephaestos had nodded once. "As I was saying, your file, Hephaestos, your file doesn't leave room for doubt. So how about you grant me your confession. In standard techno-lingua please." But Hephaestos had been frozen by terror. His mind had given up reason and logic once more. He hadn't been able to comply, even if he had wanted to reveal his role in Tremendus' research. His vox box only produced static. The lense at the far left side of his visor had registred how one of the skitarii had approached him, but still, the added threat hadn't provoked a reaction. A single feeling had dominated Hephaestos' mind, leaving no room for structured thought: fear. Mind-gripping fear.

"Pity..." Karsh had rumbled, "I hate to waste good neurotoxins on servitor fodder." And whether the adept had realized that Hephaestos' cores had frozen or not, a thick steel needle had approached the tech-priest's chest. Hephaestos had struggled, but the heavy pincer had kept him firmly in place and Karsh hadn't seemed to mind just where he would inject his serum. The sting of the needle was bad, but what came after was almost unbearable. Hephaestos couldn't even register the time that went past the penetration of the needle and the hot, burning sensation in his veins. It only took microseconds for his entire body to be drenched in pain. At first, only his biological parts were affected, but seconds later his visor had shut down, sending a scourching pain via the primary optic datacables straight to his brain. The next second his cores were infected, sending stimuli to all his extremities, making his body spasm uncontrollably, putting the servo's of his bionic legs into overdrive, making them flail wildly. Finally, the toxin had reached his memory cores and Hephaestos had wished he had never had them installed. Every single connection seemed to come apart, billions of dataconnections were ruptured violently, each and every one adding to the pain. Hephaestos had started screaming immediately after the injection, but at that time his vox box had nearly burned out due to the enormous stress he had been putting it under.

The pain had receded, just enough for Hephaestos to regain control of his limbs and voice, but his trouble hadn't come to an end. Still blinded, Hephaestos had cried out again when something had been jammed against the pale flesh of his neck. He had heard a soft, metal clicking sound and then had felt how dozens of little teeth bit into his biomatter. "Adept Hephaestos. Your pain limitations have been properly recalibrated. And they are now under my complete control." Karsh had said. "Please experience this for yourself." The pain had returned immediately, but localized in the frontal lobe of his brain. Hephaestos had trashed, slamming his own fists against his head, almost busting one of his visor's lenses. "So now you know, adept. Now you realize that you're completely powerless. Now, it is time for your confession." The pain had receded again and after a green flash, his vision was restored. Partialy. Only the closest objects had been finely outlined and the colours had been all wrong. With all the concentration he had been able to muster, Hephaestos had tried to ignore these irregularities. "Whattt... do you wisssshh... me to confessss?" he had replied weakly. A sound of rocks being split had rung through Tremendus' quarters and Hephaestos' visuals had started shaking. Somehow his brain had concluded that adept Karsh was laughing. "I understand your question... But you should understand that I am not here for easy confessions. I am not here to wantonly torture your body, be it biological or machine. No, adept... I am here because your master thread on dangerous territory. Territory that would be his demise, if he would have continued his research. And together with his downfall, he would have damaged the Mechanicus, perhaps even the core elements of our believe in the Omnissiah. I don't want to badger you into a false confession. I need to know the truth."

The pain had come back, now focused on his spine. Hephaestos had tried to bend his colon until it would have snapped, but his attempts had proven futile. He had performed a dance macabre, unable to end his pain, unable to escape. "We will continue this exercise following protocol, unless you give me your truthful confession. In proper techno-lingua, mind you." Karsh had said as if he was just asking for a simple datatransfer, instead of tearing Hephaestos apart. The adept waited for another 5.4 seconds. "No?" Hephaestos had registered surprise in Karsh' voice. But once more his sensors had become useless when a new wave of pain drowned everything out. It had been worse than anything he had experienced before, but somehow his mind had managed to keep itself together. Minimally. It had only produced a single thought: Karsh hadn't been lying about his pain limitations. And the adept had used that power to the fullest. For the next hour, wave after wave of excruciating pain had hit Hephaestos' body, each and every time focused on another part. His fingers had felt like they had been replaced by white hot steel pins, his bionic legs had weighed two tons, feeling like they were about to tear the lower half of his chest away. Each time his mind had, even unconsciously, reached for the connections with his memory cores, he had gotten stung, like getting a knife planted in your eye. But still, his mind had found a way to protect itself. It had pulled back from his body, letting it endure the pain induced by the neurotoxins, detaching itself from reality. And that had been his salvation, even if it was just chance.

Adept Karsh had dropped him to the ground. Hephaestos had remained still, a miserable collection of now reddish flesh, bones, some of them broken under the stress Hephaestos had put them under, and some, now completely uncalibrated, bionics and augmentations. "Adept Hephaestos. Your body is destroyed. Yet you withhold a confession. I have registred this before... You are protecting someone... to the detriment of yourself. You are a tech-priest of the Mechanicus. You know loyalty to a dead master is useless. I conclude that there is still someone else." Karsh had pauzed for a second, giving Hephaestos a few precious seconds to consider his situation and Karsh' behaviour. "I am now inclined to think that you were innocent..." Perhaps Hephaestos had only wanted to believe it, but he had heard truthfulness in Karsh' voice. No pity, but doubt. "But you need to tell me who I should be looking for. In these matters, all bonds of loyalty are forfait. The research of your master was harmful for the Mechanicus. Anything that hurts the Mechanicus should be cut away like a cancer. And like any decent magos biologis, I only wish to cut away the bad and spare the healthy tissue around it." Hephaestos had heard him mumble something else, but his auditory receptors hadn't been able to isolate it properly, but to this day he would swear that he had heard Karsh say "If not, we would have nothing left to scrutinize, and what's life without a purpose..."

Hephaestos had only needed a split second to decide. Even without being tortured, he would have taken the same decision. Later he had had his logicalculus drive calculate the odds of another outcome in other circumstances, but after a week or so, he had had to conclude that there weren't any scenarios however unlikely where he wouldn't have made the same choice. Apart from being sure that he had made the right decision, it had also given him something new to research: guilt.

"Adept Garant. He's the one you're looking for." His logicalculus drive had given him some minimal parametres to give this message - to make sure he wouldn't sound to eager to give up his friend after his presumed loyalty - but his strained vox box hadn't delivered the message the way he had wanted to. The words had been spit out too fast. His true mind too visible within them. Adept Kaersh hadn't noticed however. A few short bursts of binary had send the skitarii on their way. Hephaestos hadn't even noticed how adept Karsh left him lying on the floor, detaching the toxin regulator from his neck on his way out of Tremendus' quarters. Hephaestos had been left with feelings of relief, still mixed with fear. At that point guilt hadn't even made the top 10 of his preoccupations.

Hephaestos got up from his cod and opened the door of his cell, locking it behind him by putting in a four digit code into the little security keybox next to the door. The protection it provided was laughable - even an uninitiated would have no trouble finding the code eventually - but it still meant it were his own, personal quarters. Which was better than he had expected. Logic would have dictated he would have shared a bed in one of the massive dormitories. Which would have been far worse than aircycle noises for his efficiency. He started walking, his bionic feet clanking on the iron deck. Trusting his bionic legs and their gyro's, Hephaestos produced a dataslate from his robes, reopening the file he had been reading. His first attempt at selecting it, failed and once more Hephaestos cursed his weak human flesh. His bionics had recovered soon enough from Karsh' neurotoxins, but his muscles still suffered from tremors and weakness. He ached for bionic replacements, but in his current situation, he had less than a 0.01 % chance of getting such a treatment. Not the ideal circumstances for cutting off one's fingers.

Soon he arrived at the elevator hub and the servitors responsible for the lifting mechanism started pulling at a thick metal chain, attached to a pulley a few dozen metres higher. While the mindless machinemen slaved, Hephaestos thoughts wandered again, his visor unfocused on the text on his dataslate, his other sensors seemingly offline.

After his ordeal, Hephaestos had been found by another adept of the, at that point, late Tremendus 8788. His recollections of his journey and stay at the medrepair were hazy at best, but his internal chrono system had put him there for at least 180 terran hours, just over a week. Which had been enough to completely change his world. When his systems had somewhat stabilized he had found a single datacard with a short briefing and instructions. Although Hephaestos couldn't argue with the efficiency of the communication, he had still felt annoyed, which only annoyed him even further as it had been a sure sign that his logicalculus hadn't been properly recompiled. At the end of the message, Venom's name had appeared. Only her title had been changed to mech-deacon, which had been far worse than annoying.

In the briefing, Hephaestos had read that the Librarium had elected Venatoria as Tremendus' successor. Adept Garant had been apprehended by Karsh and had joined the ranks of the Librarium's servitors. In clear techno-lingua, Venom had commanded him to come before her in her newly acquired quarters. Afterwards, Hephaestos had mused that Venom's tone in the message had been far more friendly than the oral data transfer later. Apparently, Venatoria's logicalculus drive had also somehow suffered damage as smugness and glee had been clearly visible and audible during their communications. She had utterly enjoyed the fact that she was in control and she had relished at the prospect of putting Hephaestos on Cell as a glorified engineseer. Mockingly she had wished him good luck with his new task... trice. Hephaestos could still feel a choler coming up when he thought about that interaction.

"O Five! Get in you coghead. You're late!" The voice of the bloated overseer, a man with fuzzy ginger hair and a matching beard, which Hephaestos knew as commandeur second class W. McGinn, echoed from the top of the elevator shaft, making short work of any plans for retaliation on Venom. His logicalculus, now properly reconfigured, suppressed his urge to sigh or groan at the horrible abbreviation of his callsign. He stepped in the roughly timbered, wooden cage that served as the elevator car, gave the correct audio command for the servitors to start hauling up the car and prepared himself for yet another frustrating debate about the efficiency of the harvester machines with McGinn. When the servitors stopped pulling at their chains, he stepped out onto the command bridge of the colossal harvester machine, which, far above the massive iron tracks of the crawler, provided him with a commanding view of the green-and-yellow, rolling plains of Cell. Immediately McGinn started blathering, and simultaneously splattering him with thick drops of grey saliva. Once more, he understood why Venom had been so smug about all this.

When McGinn was done though, he abandoned the standard protocol. Instead of sending him to the enginarium of the harvester, he retrieved a dirty piece of paper from his back pocket. "Here O'Five. Before you head down to the engine, someone wants to see you." Hephaestos logicalculus started producing various hypotheses, each one a bit more wild than the previous. Until he shorted out the processes for the sake of efficiency and decided to go see for himself. After a long walk and the necessary, but uncomfortable climbing and clambering on various service ladders - the harvester wasn't really build for casual strolls - Hephaestos arrived at the front of the Harvester. The noise here was eardeafening as this was the place where the harverster's tracks crushed the vegetation underneat. There was a small observation post hanging on the side of the tracked behemoth that was connected to the main body of the harvester by a narrow walkway. Hephaestos knew it was a secundary system as numerous pictcorders and a few auspex wands at the front were used to steer and navigate the machine. Therefore it should be unmanned. Instead, he saw someone standing in the small cabin, the person's face covered by a hat and scarf which would help him to breath as the air around here was saturated with small biological particles of the vegetation being steam-rolled. The rest of his outfit, a baggy coverall made him unreckognizable. Although even if Hephaestos' visor would be able to get an unobstructed view on the person's identifying features, he probably wouldn't recognize him or her as he had taken no interest at all in his fellow crew members. He only spoke to the tech adepts at the enginarium and then again, only if it was absolutely necessary.

Somehow the other person had noticed him and beckoned him closer. Hephaestos proceeded, keeping both his hands on the thin and probably not so trustworthy handrails. The floor of the walkway shook and trembled and it didn't get better inside the observation post. Hephaestos noticed that over 42 percent of the screws keeping the metal plates of the cabin together, had been shaken out of their screw holes, which didn't help in restoring his confidence in the structural integrity of the cabin. He anticipated on a very difficult social interaction as he had to supress continuously certain biological reflexes that he had learned to identify as fear. but contrary to his expectations, the interaction smoother than he could possibly have predicted. The other man didn't take of his hat, nor removed his scarf. Whoever he was, didn't even speak up. Instead, he just handed over a data crystal. Hephaestos scrutinized the little thing and then retrieved the ramshackle dataslate he'd received on arrival. Luckily the thing accepted the datacrystal and soon three quarters of the screen - the machine spirit had been damaged quite badly by a nonchalant worker who had quite carelessly used the slate as a service tray to carry recaf - showed him an authorization code for an Inquisitorial document. One of his lenses screened the face of the other person again, but didn't harvest any new intel. The message on the dataslate wasn't too enlightening either, but it did make Hephaestos feel funny. Another case of intuition presented itself. Within the document there were orders to leave Cell and leave the sector to join the ranks of the Inquisition and although Hephaestos desired nothing more than to leave his current location, he wasn't entirely sure that an induction in the most secretive force of the Imperium was his preferred destination.

He didn't seem to get a lot of time to consider the situation. The other person pulled out the datacrystal from the dataslate and handed him another one. Next, he pushed past Hephaestos and moved over the service walkway towards the harvester in a brisk pace, clearly indicating that the meeting was over. Hephaestos used one of his six lenses to follow him and at the same time plugged in the second crystal. On it, he found a detailed interary and the necessary release papers to end his service on the harvester. Despite his stomach ache, Hephaestos couldn't help but smile.

* * *

Author's note:

This short story is at an end, but I'm planning on having O'Five return some day. Thank you for reading. I hope you found it entertaining. I especially hoped to write in a style that would reflect the 'Mechanicus' way of seeing things. As always, reviews are most welcome, both positive as critical.

I would also like to thank Claw, who has GM'd an awesome game for me and for which I created the character of O'Five.

For those of you who would like more, I can say that there's another story here on about an Arbite with a bit more spine than O'Five. Expect other stories in the Warhammer 40.000 universe soon. I hope you will enjoy those as well.


End file.
